Words and Music (Radio 3, Sunday) is a stealthy listen. It's easy to dismiss it as lightweight, with its themed selections of tunes and literary excerpts played without introduction or linking narration. This is radio, I always think, that's perfectly suited for doing the ironing to: varied but unobtrusive.

Yet there's always a moment that makes you realise how clever the programme really is. Yesterday's theme was alcohol and our relationship with it: good, bad, ugly, getting drunk, feeling drunk, being in the grip of a hangover. The words came from Pliny, who noted that wine causes "a feeling of warmth in the exterior of the viscera" and Hemingway, who recommended a breakfast beer if you'd stayed up too late and found yourself suffering "gastric remorse". Christopher Isherwood wrote of being at sozzled 1930s parties where it was impossible to tell "who was dancing and who was merely standing up".

But the ingenious moment yesterday came in the juxtaposition of Martin Amis's John Self, in Money, turning up for a dinner party and realising he'd already been to dinner there that night ("and something told me I hadn't behaved too well"), followed by Tom Waits (left) growling through The Piano Has Been Drinking. These two narrators were perfect partners: selfish, bleakly funny, in denial, drinking to forget and forgetting what they'd drunk.